bitterbittertears (2010, HD 25min)

"bitterbittertears" (2010, HD 25m) is an experimental homage to Rainer Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant with contemporary performance artists Erin Markey, Laure Drogoul, and visual artist Alex Worthington. The piece examines the intricacies of melodrama by re-visiting Fassbinder's exploration of lesbian power dynamics overshadowed by patriarchal forces. Tension, foreboding, and resolution are twisted and heightened to an uncanny degree by harshly insightful performances, high production values blurring the line between analogue/digital aesthetics, and unique editing techniques.

"The focus is taken off social 'issues' and placed, instead, on the medium of film-making itself, the nature of influence, tradition, irony, parody, and artifice. The flat repetition of Fassbinder's lines can be read, from this perspective, as both a kind of tense mocking of the antiquated notions of gender and sexuality that the 1972 film wrestles with and an acceptance of Fassbinder as part of the cinematic tradition that Pancake participates in. As such, the repetitions and variations that Pancake utilizes are complex; they do not function as simple commentaries, criticisms, or parodies of the original. Even the doubled word 'bitter' in the film's title is hard to place; it can be read as a sarcastic sending-up of Fassbinder's high seriousness, a nod to a precursor, a push to consider the importance of the copy in art, or a clever foreshadowing of the spatio-temporal symmetry in the most manipulated scenes of the movie." December 2011, Max Andrade Ubelaker PhD,Boston University Read the Full Essay